At about 1am, Beatrice had gone to bed but my mother, brother, sister Jane and I were still in the study when the phone rang. It was a Daily Mirror reporter saying they were 99 per cent certain my father had been found in Melbourne. He rang back at 2am and confirmed the news, saying the Melbourne police were going to make a statement at 4am our time. From then on, the phone rang continuously with journalists wanting to know what was going on, so we decided to take the phone off the hook until 4am, when we might have some answers. It then occurred to my mother that the man they’d found was likely to be Bill Stonehouse, my father’s pilot brother, who’d gone to Singapore a few years earlier and had actually lived in Australia previously. From elation, we fell back to despair.
As soon as Jane put the phone back on the handset at 4am, it rang. We saw the utter amazement on her face and heard her say ‘Daddy, Daddy, is it really you?’. Jane wrote in her diary: ‘I went weak, cold, hot, shaky. He sounded as if all his nerves were being stretched right to their limit, ready to snap. His voice was high and he was definitely not himself. All he could say was that he was sorry, sorry, sorry.’ The front door was banging furiously. Jane handed the phone to my mother, who was visibly shaking. She fell into a chair. ‘John?’ she asked, unbelieving. ‘Yes, darling, it’s so good to hear your voice,’ he said. My mother’s questions came in quick succession: ‘What’s happened? Where are you? What have you been doing?’ He replied, ‘I’m sorry I’ve given you so much trouble, darling. It didn’t work out. I tried to make it easier for you all, but it didn’t work out. I’m here at the Melbourne Police Station with my very good friends John Coffey and Bob Gillespie.’
The door was still banging loudly, and Jane went to answer it. It was three Daily Express reporters holding air tickets to Melbourne in their hands. She wrote a note: ‘Daily Express at front door. Have tickets first plane out to Australia. Do you want to go?’ and thrust it into my mother’s hand. She told my father what the note said and asked if he wanted her to come. ‘Yes, come as soon as you can,’ he said, and then came the kicker: ‘and bring Sheila with you.’ This came as a shock because we had no idea that Sheila was so important to him. She was 28, Jane was 25, and I was just about to turn 24. Sheila was of our generation, not his. Jane wrote in her diary: ‘What a nerve – he’s flipped his lid.’
We were all crying, and laughing, and hugging each other and trying to analyse what he meant by ‘it didn’t work out’ and ‘make it easier for you all’. We were baffled, but thrilled. By now it was about 4.30am and the three Daily Express men were waiting in the sitting room. They were keen to get away as soon as possible to avoid the rest of the press who would surely be on their way. One of them, Jack Hill, said they’d cover my mother’s flight and expenses and pay £4,000 cash in return for the first story of their reunion, plus pictures. As my mother had no other funds at the time, she accepted the offer, and went to get ready. Paul Hopkins, the chief investigative reporter of the Daily Express then arrived; she’d travel with him and Bill Lovelace, their photographer. Before she packed, my mother phoned Sheila with the news my father was alive. It sounded as if she already knew. My mother asked her not to go out to Australia, at least for the present, and Sheila agreed. By 5.30am a three-car cavalcade was heading for Gatwick Airport.
Half an hour later, the rest of the press started to arrive. It was important not to let them know my mother wasn’t in the house. We didn’t want them chasing her down at the airport. In fact, the Daily Express had laid good plans. They figured that the press would expect my mother to travel through Heathrow, so they’d booked flights from Gatwick to Paris, with a connection in the afternoon to Melbourne. They went to the ticket desk and Paul Hopkins asked the woman: ‘I think you have tickets for me.’ The woman asked: ‘What name?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘what names have you got?’ She looked at him quizzically. ‘How many tickets should you have?’ she asked. ‘Three to Paris,’ said Hopkins. ‘Well, I’ve got one for a Mrs Church, one for a Mr Poulson and one for a Mr Hanlon,’ the woman said. Hopkins knew they were the right names because he’d worked on the John Poulson fraud story, and these were the aliases his office had jokingly adopted for their incognito travel. After a couple of hours at the new, futuristic Charles de Gaulle airport, they were on their long flight to Melbourne.
We found out that the CIA had been bugging the phones at Faulkners Down House when my friend Derek arrived. From America, a ‘friend of a friend’ had played down his phone a recording of Derek on our phone at Faulkners Down, taken when he’d been there a week or so earlier fielding calls from the press. He got his electronics kit out and played us recordings of our own telephone calls on the F.M. radio. ‘It’s the CIA’, he said, as he de-bugged the phones. Derek wasn’t just an electronics expert; he was the go-to computer and security guy used by three royal families that I know of. He was in a class of his own. We weren’t outraged that the CIA had been bugging us, we were used to the phones being tapped: them or someone else, did it matter?
It was a strange Christmas Day. The phone never stopped ringing and the door never stopped banging. We were besieged. By late morning, the owner of the house and farm arrived to say the farm vehicles couldn’t get up the lane and we’d have to move out – permanently. But Jane, Beatrice, Mathew and I weren’t bothered; he was alive, and that was all we cared about. And the woman did have a point: there were 25 press cars parked down the tiny lane and none of us could move. We heard that our father could be deported and that our mother might not be allowed into Australia. Everything was uncertain – literally everything. At least we had food, which is more than can be said for the dozens of reporters and photographers barking around the house like a pack of hounds with the scent of blood in their nostrils. They should’ve been with their families and probably resented having to be there, out in the cold, in Hampshire. Some would soon be on their way to Australia. I bet their wives and children weren’t too pleased with the timing. Either way, if we thought the press had been bad up to this point, it was about to get a whole lot worse.
On the 27th December 1974 the Daily Mail proudly announced it had 25 people working on ‘the Stonehouse file’ and they named their seventeen reporters in London, two in Melbourne, two in New York, three photographers in London plus one in Australia. The Daily Express put 22 reporters on the job, including their cricket correspondent, while The Times added their Sydney-based opera writer to their team. The News of the World equipped their nine reporters with £15,000 in cash, ready to pay random people for whatever they could get. The press invested heavily in the story and they wanted spies, sex and scandal. We felt hunted, a commodity, and that the last people the press cared about was us.
9
Man Drowning
While the coastguard were looking for John Stonehouse or his body, Mr Markham was on a non-stop flight to San Francisco. He caught a taxi into the city and asked the driver to take him to a good hotel. They arrived at the vast and magnificent Fairmont, high on a hill overlooking the city and North Beach. He asked for a single room, but they didn’t have one so accommodated him for the same price in their best suite, the largest my father had ever seen. It seemed as if luck was on Markham’s side.
The next day, the 21st November, he flew to Honolulu and booked into room 1706 at the Sheraton Waikiki Hotel. Mr Markham would make two calls from the Sheraton, both of five minutes duration, to the Highfield House Hotel in Hampstead, the first on the 22nd November, and the second on the 25th. Residents at the Highfield House Hotel didn’t have phones in their rooms. All calls to them went through reception, who buzzed individual rooms, alerting the occupant that they should take a call at the communal phone on the landing. At the trial at the Old Bailey, which began in April 1976, Sheila said she was completely bowled over to receive that first call from my father, that he was completely distraught, incoherent, and she thought he sounded suicidal. She asked whether she should let the family know, and he said ‘no’. She thought it would be dangerous to tell anyone
he was alive because of a possible suicide attempt by him. Three days later, he phoned her again. She said the calls were confusing because he was speaking about himself in the third person, saying ‘John’ had to get away from the pressures in England. She said that at no time did he use the first person – ‘I’ – it was always ‘he’ or ‘him’. He seemed confused about who he was.
On the 22nd November, my father went to the Bank of Hawaii and, using the name ‘Lewis Jones’, purchased two bank drafts of $8,977 and $4,200, issued in the name of Joseph Markham. On the 25th November, Markham booked out of the Sheraton Waikiki Hotel, paying $308.76 on his American Express card. Now he faced his greatest challenge – entering Australia and having his new migrant status accepted. It turned out to be easier than he expected. The flight to Sydney had a stop-over in Nouméa, New Caledonia, a French territory, and from Sydney he flew to Melbourne and, on the 27th November, arrived at the portentous desk of freedom. The immigration officer took his passport, and the large manila envelope he’d taken with him containing the X-ray negative and certificate confirming he didn’t have TB, stamped his passport with a big round print saying ‘Permitted to Enter’ and said, ‘You are one of us now.’ He also mentioned that entry wouldn’t be so simple after 31st December, when a visa would be required.
Markham booked into the Sheraton Hotel on Spring Street and at 2pm headed for the Stock Exchange branch of the Bank of New South Wales (BNSW) at 395 Little Collins Street, where his account was supposed to be. He found that the building had been demolished so he went to the bank’s HQ at 425 Collins Street and found his documentation was there. Mr Mulcahy had the letter of introduction from their London branch, and ascertained that the £14,100 (A$24,982.38 in Australian dollars) Markham had asked to be transferred from London to a deposit account was there. He withdrew A$3,000, which was used to open a current account, and Mr Markham was given a temporary book of five cheques, pending the printing of a personalised cheque book. Mr Markham told Mr Mulcahy that he was an export consultant and he’d like to convert two Bank of Hawaii bank drafts into one BNSW draft for US$13,177. Mr Mulcahy took him to see Mr White in the Overseas Exchange Section, who prepared the draft – which would later be credited to Markham’s Swiss Bank Corporation account in Zurich. Then Mr Markham went back to Mr Mulcahy and, using his temporary cheque book, withdrew A$500 in cash.
The next day, the 28th, Mr Markham went back to the BNSW at 425 Collins Street and asked Ms O’Bree if he could withdraw A$21,500 from his savings account. After taking twenty minutes to arrange the cash, Ms O’Bree handed it to him. At 11.30am, this same man walked into the Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) at 347 Collins Street and asked the female teller about savings investment account interest rates and removed a large amount of cash from the satchel he was carrying, and placed it on the counter. Watching nearby was the ever-observant Mr King, who went over and directed the man to the teller’s box so he could count the cash. It came to A$22,000, and Mr King put it in the safe before introducing the man to the bank’s accountant, Mr Rowland. The man introduced himself as Donald Clive Mildoon and told Mr Rowland that he was an insurance broker, and that after about twelve months he’d be moving to New Zealand. Mr Rowland asked Mr Mildoon for a passport as identification but Mr Mildoon said he didn’t have it on him but he’d bring it on a later visit. Without ID, Mr Rowland couldn’t open a current account, but he could open an investment saving account, and did so. At 12.30pm, Mr King had finished his lunch in the staff room and had gone for his customary lunchtime stroll along Collins Street. That’s when he saw the man whose cash he’d counted earlier come out of the BNSW at 425 Collins Street, and return to his bank, the BNZ at 347 Collins Street, where the man deposited a further A$2,200. Mr King told Mr Rowland what he’d seen and Mr Rowland made a note on the bank’s Master File Card, indicating that this customer should be treated with extreme caution and that no cheque account should be opened without certain identification. Meanwhile, back at the BNSW, Mr Street was thinking it unusual for a person to withdraw A$21,500 in cash and he telexed London asking for a copy of certain correspondence. Although everything seemed to be in order, Mr Street now joined Mr Rowland and Mr King in thinking there was something odd, and possibly fraudulent, about this man. My father had been in Melbourne less than two days, and through his own careless behaviour had already managed to raise the alarm. The banking community of Collins Street would put their heads together and ensure that by the time he turned up again, Mr Markham/Mildoon would be under police surveillance.
Oblivious to this, Markham transferred his suitcase to a cheaper hotel, The Regal on Fitzroy Street, in the district of St Kilda, and headed straight for the airport. This time he was going to Copenhagen, via Perth, Singapore and Bangkok, with a short stopover in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. On the 29th November he arrived in Copenhagen, booking into single room number 357 at the Grand Hotel around 9.30pm, where he stayed for one night. He made no calls. On Saturday the 30th, he booked into a cheaper – and warmer – hotel. All alone, he wandered around the cold streets of Copenhagen on that Saturday, and Sunday, and Monday and Tuesday, looking for English newspapers to find out what was going on back in the UK. ‘Ghostly memories’ were haunting him, and he wanted them put to rest. But there was to be no rest. He wrote: ‘From the newspaper accounts it was evident that some people – and certain sections of the press themselves – were not only dancing on the grave of the missing man, they were trying to dig up the corpse to tear it limb from limb so it would get no peace. The allegations were fantastic.’1
Early on the morning of Wednesday the 4th, he finally phoned Sheila at the Highfield House Hotel and lamented ‘They won’t let him die, why won’t they let him die?’ She was frantic and, on top of that, thought she might be pregnant. He said he wanted to see her. She was concerned that she wouldn’t be able to get to Copenhagen without half the British press finding out. He said if she didn’t come to him, he would come to London. As he sounded far too unstable for that, Sheila agreed to go to him and went to the Hampstead Travel Agency in Heath Street and bought a one-way ticket to Copenhagen, for Friday 6th December, departing Heathrow Airport at 2.30pm. Sheila had asked for a later time, but the 4.30pm flight with Scandinavian Airlines was fully booked. She paid with her own credit card but had the ticket issued in the name of Mrs E. Morgan. Later that day my father phoned back to find out her plans: she’d be arriving on Friday evening.
On the afternoon before going to Copenhagen, Sheila went to see her doctor to get tranquillisers, and broke down in tears. The doctor warned her about the dangers of taking an overdose. She headed for the airport, all the while worried about being followed by the press. This was the weekend they, and my mother, wanted to ask her questions about the flat in Vandon Court. At Copenhagen Airport, she found my father sitting in the middle of the arrival lounge, with his head resting in his cupped hands. He looked pale and thin; he was distraught and nervous. Many British people had arrived on the same plane, and it was a miracle nobody recognised him.
Over the next day-and-a-half, he told Sheila that he’d been travelling under the name of Markham and planned to settle in Australia. He asked Sheila to write to him in the name of Mildoon, care of the Bank of New Zealand. At the trial Sheila said: ‘It was then that he told me that he was also Mr Mildoon, which had the result of leaving me totally confused, but my own confusion was the least of my worries.’2 What they talked about, nobody knows. Personally, I think that when he phoned her from Hawaii he told her he was going to Australia because when she went to dinner with Caroline Gay, Philip’s wife, on the 25th or 26th November Sheila said she intended to work abroad and might go to Australia as she had friends over there. She did have friends there, but now she had a special friend there as well. Caroline told the police later that Sheila ‘kept insisting that everyone should accept that John Stonehouse was dead’, implying he’d had a heart attack because he’d ‘had difficulty in using one of his arms or hands’.3 At that point, of course, she knew he was aliv
e. It wouldn’t surprise me if, on learning he was alive when he phoned from Hawaii, she determined to heal him, save him and start a new life with him. He was all she cared about. She loved him, was devoted to him, stood in the dock at the Old Bailey with him, waited three years for him to get out of jail, married him, had a son with him, and my father died in her arms. However, ‘saving’ a man is a very different thing to being involved in his madcap idea in the first place. That’s where the Old Bailey judge and I differ in opinion. On Saturday 7th December, my father bought Sheila’s return ticket on flight SK 503 to London, leaving at 4.15pm on Sunday 8th, when he would fly to Singapore, with stops in Moscow, Delhi and Bangkok. From there he went to Perth, to acquire the precious immigration stamp, and spent the night of the 9th in a motel before flying on to Melbourne.
I’ve lost count of the number of flights my father took between 20th November and 10th December. If they’d had frequent flyer points in those days, he would have been given a platinum card. What they did have was a selection of British and other newspapers which they gave to passengers, and his face was all over them, next to the words ‘Missing MP’. Any passenger on any flight could have recognised him. My father was a trained RAF pilot, he’d been a minister of aviation, worked on the development of Concorde, and negotiated the sales of Rolls Royce engines that powered the very planes he was flying around in. He knew pilots, airport staff and airline executives. Any one of them could have recognised him from former professional contact as he walked through the many airport lounges. When Sheila met him in Copenhagen, he was not wearing any kind of disguise. If he was trying to keep a low profile, this was no way to go about it. If he wanted to escape the British authorities, why not go to Brazil where they had no extradition treaty? He’d already made basic, stupid mistakes that would ensure he’d soon be under police surveillance, and booked into the Regal Hotel in St Kilda using two names, confusing Steve Erdos on reception. He’d soon use two names when renting an apartment from Mr and Mrs Wilcocks. He confused people because he was himself confused. This wasn’t the behaviour of an arch criminal, and he wasn’t stupid. He simply wasn’t thinking straight.
John Stonehouse, My Father Page 10